Reading Household Wireless Utility Meters with an RTL-SDR and Plotting the Data in Home Automation Software
Over on YouTube Debashish Sahu has uploaded a video showing how he uses an RTL-SDR to capture and decode consumption data from his home electric/gas/water utility meters. He uses the rtl_amr software which already supports a wide range of meters such as Debashish's gas meter. Later in the video he shows a Python script that he's written which continuously grabs the data from rtl_amr, and passes it into the Home Assistant software using JSON. Then in Home Assistant the data is graphed, and he is able to determine points of interest, such as when appliances turned on or off.
I’ve been collecting data from my water and power meters using two instances of rtl-amr fed into an InfluxDB stack. That makes for easy dashboard creation and rearrangement. Data is sourced in JSON and a python script dumps it to Influx. Based off of this page.
I’ve been running rtl-amr for several months building up a backlog of data without any analysis or plan, and it’s convenient timing that as I’m migrating hardware around, I find this article and a package by the rtl-amr author for the same task called “rtlamr-collect”.
Should be interesting to compare the two and see which I can import my backlog data into most effectively.
github -> /bemasher/rtlamr-collect